Posted
by
msmash
on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @12:20PM
from the things-Torvalds-does dept.

The first day of 2017 starts off for Linux users with the release of the second RC (Release Candidate) development version of the upcoming Linux 4.10 kernel, as announced by Linus Torvalds himself. From a report on Softpedia: As expected, Linux kernel 4.10 entered development two weeks after the release of Linux kernel 4.9, on Christmas Day (December 25, 2016), but don't expect to see any major improvements or any other exciting things in RC2, which comes one week after the release of the first RC, because most of the developers were busy partying. With a total of 26 changes, Linux kernel 4.10 Release Candidate 2 is extremely small for an RC build, but Linus Torvalds decided not to skip it and interrupt the development cycle of Linux 4.10 just because of the Christmas and New Year's holidays. "It's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that RC2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small," said Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement. "I almost decided to skip RC2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody."

Back before development was professionalized, was Christmas a period of rapid change as kernel hackers finally had time off work to really dig into Linux?

I doubt it. Many would be students and for Christmas they are busy with family things. The days it's soggy, windy and overall shitty to be out in late autumn or early spring long before exams would probably be the bulk of it.

I'm new to Linux, and I'm confused about how the kernel relates to systemd. Is the kernel a part of systemd? If they are separate, why?

systemd is the Windowsification of Linux: take a corporate-mandated (I'm looking at YOU, Red Hat!) solution in search of a problem, and use it to break that which is not broken (even if it might need some improvment) in order to produce vendor lock-in as much as possible.

Systemd is kind of like the glue between applications and the kernel. It has replaced the init system that was the standard on many popular linux distros. You don't need to worry about that, this is the core of the linux OS and will do everything it's supposed to do on its own. You don't integrate this with an existing linux system, it's a standalone. Also, since you're a linux noob, you should just stick to Linux Mint or maybe one of the versions of Ubuntu that doesn't ship with Unity, like Kubuntu or Xubu

As I read behind the headline, "small" means "small number of changes".

As I read the headline itself, "small" sounds like "tiny memory footprint".

Reading the headline I expected it to be notice that Linus had released a stripped down kernel for platforms that need a minimal functionality kernel because they have limited resources or need substantial security auditing and thus a kernel with no unnecessary code to be examined for security issues. That's not what I find the article to be about, at all.

"but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody." FUCK anybody who says that. I get enough small meaningless updates all the time, and I'm about ready to chuck this fucking computer crap out the window because of it.

No "release rage" outburst warranted, and both your computer and window should be left alone. He's talking about one of the incremental internal releases of the Linux kernel, on the way to a final 4.10 Linux kernel release, some weeks from now..